Follow me on an Adventure of a Life Time as Tina, Denise and I prepare to live in Mexcico for three weeks of our summer in order to better understand the students that we teach! This life time opportunity is funded by the Tulsa Community Foundation, Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, and delivered to us through a grant program called Fund for Teachers!

Me fastidia las personaa que son intolerantes!

y me fastidia y didos dedos se arruga con agua. Wierd, i know. School wasn't so bad today. I felt a little less.... unteachable.... I think i will enroll in a spanish class for the fall semester when i get back to Tulsa. I am considering not taking classes next week here though and instead trying to put to use some of what i have learned. It is just SO much information to take in, and there are still SO many things to do before we leave. I will wait and see how the rest of the week goes. We went back to the school today at 2:00 and had a great time with the kids. We reviewed what we learned last Friday, sang the head and shoulders song again, and learned the hokey pokey. I sat with a five year old for a long time and we would trade words - spanish for english and english for spanish and she would copy down my english making the typcial transcription mistakes that all kids do. She would ask me questions in spanish and i would try and answer and try and ask her questions in return and she would giggle. She would often forget that i didn't understand 95% of what she was saying and just start rambling away. (she was terribly shy, but only for the first 5 minutes). We looked at one of the books that we had brought - animales - in spanish and in English. They were animals such as tiger, hippo, lion, giraffe.... about ten of them. Giraffe was the only one that she could name even in Spanish. It really drove home to me the challenges that we deal with on a day to day basis within our classrooms at Marshall. We really aren't teaching just ENGLISH vocabulary, many of our students come from a limited (or diferent) vocabulary base than what we would take for granted. What kid doens't know what an elephant is!!!! It made the concept of "being there" experiences - of simple things like taking our kids to the zoo...... all that more important. We work so hard to tie objectives to field trips when in reality, the trip itself, the eye candy that it provides just in being able to "name" objects is worth the price of the bus. Even for me, here, there are so many things that i have no name for. Such as the spikey green food on the kitchen counter now; that is like a veggie if you steam it and a fruit if you boil it in salt. It is nameless to me (seeing as i already forgot the name). Taxi down to the adoquin for dinner and now we are home to blog and do homework and read (of course). Me encanta el mar! I'm going to spend my morning there tomorrow!